I’m just a 40-something dad living in Edmonton, Canada. I run. I write. I take photos. I build digital toys. I spend a lot of time outside or in front of a stove.
I wrote a personal blog for more than sixteen years. It started in my early twenties when I went out to live on the west coast after University and needed an efficient way to communicate with a broad network of friends. Those social media platforms we take for granted now were barely a thing and people wrote (usually by hand coding) these crazy new online journals called blogs. It moved through multiple platforms, multiple identities, and multiple phases of readability and audience. For a while I would have claimed that people actually read it, and in the mid aughts I even won an online award for the thing.
Ultimately I realized that I don’t care if people read this thing so much as it gives me reasons to do stuff if I write about it. And writing is good for the soul. So… here we are. Another personal blog, reset from the old to set a course for the new, and onward we go.
Finally, I write under an alias. Why? Because the effort to connect who am in real life with what I write online (even if it’s just gardening, cooking, and video game jabber) should be big enough (not impossible, but enough of a pain) that no one can connect the two without real work. In other words, I’ve gone to elaborate effort to separate my private opinion from reflecting back on my employer or my professional self, and you should take that as if none of this is advice or (honestly) meant as anything more than personal opinion. So if yours differs so much from mine that you feel the need to express it in a way that is offensive, vile, illegal, or construed as an attempt to defame me please remember that this is a strictly personal space and I will always treat and defend it as such.